The Insides

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

  “Enough,” Ollie says. She looks up at the kitchen clock. “Shouldn’t you be on your way out anyway? Aren’t you working tonight?”

  Victor looks up at the clock, then checks it against his watch. “Fuck,” he says, finally. “Yep. I gotta go.”

  They head up the hall together. In the doorway, Victor lingers for a moment. “You know,” he says, “you looked awesome back there. You were like on fire.”

  “Well,” she says, after a moment, “thanks.”

  “I never really understood,” he says, “why you stopped.”

  “What do you mean?” she says, unsure as to whether she really wants to have this conversation. “Why I stopped what?”

  “All of it,” he says. “Magic. I don’t understand why you stopped doing magic. You’re really good at it. You could have been one of the greats.”

  She thinks for a minute. And then finally, she says, “It’s stupid to want to be one of the greats at magic. Magic is supposed to just be a means to an end. A way of getting what you want. And when you get what you want, you should stop.”

  “So that’s you, then?” Victor says, an edge of irritation in his voice. “The woman who got everything she wanted?”

  “Sure,” she says, affecting a theatrical blitheness. “I have a good job and an affordable apartment and a roommate who is a tiny little bundle of naked ambitions, and who hardly ever violates space-time in order to pursue those ambitions”—she gives him a smile with some venom in it; he looks demurely away—“what more, in my wildest dreams, could I possibly want?”

  But the thought crosses her mind, before she can stop it: My kid. My Goddamn kid.

  “No, you’re right,” Victor says, looking her straight in the face. “I can’t think of a solitary thing.”

  Once Victor’s gone she goes into the bathroom, washes her hands finally. From there she splashes hot water on her face, glares at her reflection. She’s too exhausted to brush her own teeth. It’s been a long day. She’s still wearing the clothes that she got sick in. She strips them off, drops them to the floor.

  It’s only like eight o’clock; way too early to go to sleep, but she climbs into bed with her phone nevertheless. She flips glassily between a couple of different news stories but can’t coherently assemble them into anything that matters to her life in any way.

  She keeps thinking about the Inside. What it would be like if you could get in there, what you could do. She’s still not exactly sure what it would mean, to have the power that that space promises, but she has a gut feeling that you could use it to get things, that you could use it to get anything you wanted.

  If those things—those worms—whatever they are—didn’t kill you first, she thinks. They’re dangerous.

  But maybe, just maybe, says a little voice from deep within, they wouldn’t be as dangerous if you had the right tool. Something to give you more control over the experience. A tool. Something you could use to protect yourself. A weapon.

  Something like a magic knife.

  No, the reasonable part of herself thinks, trying to stuff that thought back down before it can gain momentum. But her body is already acting independently, poking at her phone, checking to see whether Guychardson’s number is in there. She scrolls through her contacts and is a little surprised to find him. She taps his name and some options pop up.

  Without really thinking about it, she starts a message to him: HEY IT’S OLLIE. YOU GOING TO INDUSTRY NIGHT AT OVID TOMORROW? MY ROOMMATE VICTOR AND I ARE GOING, MAYBE SEE YOU THERE?

  And then she hits send. She stares at the screen as it goes, frowning slightly, as though she’s not quite convinced that what she’s seeing happen is entirely real.

  Well, OK, she thinks, finally. There’s that, then. She falls asleep while waiting for a response. The phone cradled loosely in her open hand.

  10

  ATTEMPT

  When Maja was eighteen years old, Eivind, her brother, had been found in a graveyard in the foothills near town, dragged into a shallow gravel ditch, unconscious, blunt force trauma about the head, skull fractured in two places. It was the worst violence her town had seen since the war.

  Journalists came to the house, where she was alone, and interviewed her. One team spent the entire day outside on the tiny square of gravel lawn, waiting for her face to appear at the window. One team met her father at the pier, attempting to catch a shot of his face as he got off the boat, hoping to see what a grieving fisherman looks like.

  She spent the better part of the following two days in the hospital, at her brother’s bedside. It was awful to look at him but at least it was quiet, at least there was no one there to ask her questions, to ask her how it felt to have a brother who was a victim, as though the answer to that was not the most obvious thing in the world.

  Besides: she thought she could learn something from looking at him. She thought that if she saw his wounds she could understand them. She could learn their history, figure out how they came into the world. And if she could figure that out, she could figure out who had caused them, and why. But the wounds were covered in sterile pads and so all she could see was his face, which was horribly still, and the history of his face was, of course, the history of his fifteen years on earth, and the tangle of memories and impressions that came from looking at his face shared so much confusing overlap with her own memories of those years. The same home, the same parents, the same streets. She was afraid that if she looked into his face for too long she would lose sight of which experiences were his and which were hers. She only wanted to see the wounds, going so far as to ask a nurse whether the dressing could be removed, just for a minute, a request which was firmly denied, and accompanied by a look she’d become familiar with, the look that told her that she was acting strangely.

  On the second day she realized that she was going to need to touch him. Touching people was worse, for her, than just being around them or seeing them. The flow of information was steadier, more intense—too intense. After a few bad experiences she’d instituted a complete ban on touching others or being touched by them.

  This ban was not especially difficult to implement, once she’d really decided on it: she kept her distance from strangers as a matter of course, had few friends, and came from a family in which no one was prone to physical affection. But sitting by Eivind’s bedside she found herself wanting to know as much as possible about what had happened to him, and by morning on the second day she knew that touching him was going to be the best way to achieve that goal. And so when she was alone with him she let her fingers rest on his forehead, and she let his knowledge flow into her.

  The first thing she looked for was his memory of the morning of the assault. Walking among graves, his heavy 35mm camera bouncing against his chest. Bending low to inspect some particular engraved name, then pausing, framing the name in the camera’s viewfinder, taking a photograph. And then: the peculiar surge of light that accompanies a concussive blow.

  She jerked her hand away. She felt a rush of blood enter her face, constrict her throat, push tears into her eyes. She paused. She exhaled, hard, and when she was ready she touched his forehead again.

  He was crouched over when the second blow landed: all he could see was stones, grass, dirt, the dangling camera. But after the second blow he managed to get up, start running. The graveyard sawing crazily as he barreled forward, panicked. The sounds of someone in pursuit.

  At some point he stopped and turned, to face his pursuer, and as she watched these memories she pleaded with him not to stop, not to turn, instead to keep on running. But even as she begged him silently to do the one thing that she knew he would not, did not do, she also wanted him to stop, to turn, to look. There was a part of her that needed him to make this bad decision, that needed him to pause and take the blow that was coming. To get a square look at the person who was dealing it. And he did, almost as though he knew that she would want him to. Almost as if he was accommodating her wish.

  She saw what she needed to
see. She saw the face of the other boy. Older than Eivind, but not by much. Younger than her, but not by much. She guessed seventeen. Denim jacket, lank hair, a spray of pimples across the bridge of his narrow nose.

  She saw the baseball bat in the boy’s hand. Her lips went thin. It was just a toy. Some fucking American toy.

  “Stop,” she heard Eivind say.

  The boy raised the bat again, swung it into Eivind’s face.

  She took her hand away. At this point she knew what she had the ability to do. She could find the boy. And if she couldn’t find the boy—humans still being hard for her, at this time—she could certainly find the bat.

  She did not have a plan for what she would do when she found it. But she knew that once she left the hospital, the first thing she would do would be to begin looking, and she had no doubt that once she began, she would be successful.

  She felt no need to rush. It was more important to stay here in the hospital, with Eivind. So for another day she stayed there, periodically touching his hands or his shoulder or his bruised face, and she learned more and more of what he had seen in his life—not just the assault but all sorts of things. The things he took photos of. The images in his rule books, the maps he drew for himself. The way that she looked through his eyes. She came to understand the way in which, for the only time in her life, she was beloved.

  She took more and more of him in. Normally this was not a thing she would have done. She understood that it was invasive, that she was well beyond any limit that either of them might have set under ordinary conditions. She watched as he pined after a girl, a classmate, watched as he timidly kissed that girl on the eve of her move to another town, watched him cry into his pillow that night. She read the letters he wrote to her. She looked at the things that he looked at on the computer when no one else was around: jagged pictures of women, their breasts out, grainy and alone in ordinary rooms.

  She was holding his hand when his brain functions failed, when he went into cardiac arrest and died. Triage nurses, arriving in response to some squalling machine, tried to pull her away, but she held on ferociously, swinging wildly out with her other hand. All the swimming had made her strong, for when it mattered.

  In the moments it took her brother to die he was able to send her a transmission of exquisite richness. He gave her everything: a complete repository of everything he had seen or thought or felt, compressed into a single packet, faceted, internally reflective, like a diamond. And edged like a diamond: it entered her mind, shearing as it went, until it had cleaved out a space for itself. A space where she could store him, in his entirety. An archive.

  When the transmission was complete and her brother was dead she allowed herself to be yanked away; she vividly remembers a furious technician striking her a glancing blow across the face, although even later that day, at home, showering off the stink of the hospital, she found the memory impossible, tainted with a whiff of the unreal.

  She awakens. By eight she’s back in the car with Pig, stoically enduring the sluggish flow of morning traffic like any other pair of commuters. For breakfast they each have coffee and a doughnut.

  Once the traffic thins out, finding the points of the triangle is easy. The first one they find is a three-story building in Brooklyn, Bedford-Stuyvesant. Pig looks out the window at it.

  “Here?” he says, skepticism in his voice.

  It doesn’t look like much, it’s true. Three stories, brown paint over brick. The building’s upper edge is adorned with a row of plastic satellite dishes; the windows are occupied by boxy air conditioners and exhaust fan units. The ground floor is a retail place that primarily appears to sell Mylar balloons. But the other entrance—a plain unmarked door—is registering in her mind with almost psychedelic intensity. She can detect hundreds of teeming currents of energy, each one a path that the blade has taken, each slightly different, but all of them pass through the frame of that doorway. When she closes her eyes she sees the traces as luminescent lines of force, threading together: the doorway glows in her mind like an afterimage that won’t fade. She frowns: she’s not used to the traces of an object burning this brightly. The blade is not merely coveted, desirable, precious, it’s something more. It’s powerful.

  “Is it in there right now?” Pig asks.

  She concentrates, tries to sort the paths in a way that would allow her to detect whether the knife went in and didn’t go back out. But there’s too many flows, radiating too intensely: she can’t manage to sort them into a chronology.

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  She turns away from the door, looks Pig in the face, watches the warring impulses playing out there. She can see the part of him that wants to go for it, the part that thinks a 33 percent chance of success is close enough to warrant making a move. He’s wanted this blade his whole life, as near as she can tell, and he’s never had a 33 percent chance of success before, and she can see that it’s making him go a little crazy. She can see that it’s tempting him to get up, right this second, get out of the car, retrieve his Beretta M9A1 9mm pistol out of the trunk, and commence a forward assault, forcing his way through the door and upstairs, into the unknown. The moment grows tense, as though some taut figure were hovering in the air of the car.

  Is this guy really that stupid, asks the Archive.

  He wants what he wants, replies Maja.

  Yeah, I can see that, says the Archive. But that doesn’t excuse bad strategy.

  We’ve seen bad extraction strategies before, Maja replies.

  Sure, says the Archive. But they’re always embarrassing.

  It’s none of our business, Maja thinks. We just find what the clients want us to find. After that they can do whatever stupid thing they want. We can always just walk away. It’s a canned line, the one she always uses, although knowing what she knows now—how powerful this object is—makes her feel a little uncertain about its truth.

  Pig releases a held breath and something dissipates. His sense has won out over his appetite, at least for now.

  They stick with the original plan, visiting the remaining two points of the triangle. The first one they hit is the other Brooklyn one: a Caribbean restaurant, Café Soulouque. Tiny, twenty feet of storefront hidden behind a metal grille. Again its entryway is alive with intensities, the traces of passage. Pig gets out of the car, toes the lock that holds the grille shut, crouches down to inspect its long shank. Maja gets out, too, just to stretch. She leans back and looks at the vinyl awning, which bears multiple occurrences of what she quickly determines to be the Haitian coat of arms: a palm tree, cannons, flags, bayonets. Pig walks down the street a bit, past a minuscule income tax place, checks out a chain-link gate, locked with a loop of cable. Behind it a broken concrete path leads to a side door, presumably the entrance to some kind of service corridor.

  He takes the chain-link in one hand and gives the gate an exploratory rattle. “Does the knife ever go through here?” he asks. “In addition to the front door?”

  “Yes,” she answers.

  Pig nods, then takes the lock cable up in his hand, and pauses, calculating something.

  And then they both get back in the car, drive back over to Manhattan, and find the final point: another restaurant. This one’s in a busy downtown district, so they don’t park, but they drive around the block three times to examine the door, a tall piece of heavy smoked glass, recessed between a pair of dark marble pillars, seething with evidence. From the street you can just make out the single etched word CARNAGE.

  “Restaurants,” Pig says. “A couple of fucking restaurants.”

  It’s ten p.m. They’ve returned to the Caribbean place, figuring it was the easiest site to make an initial extraction attempt.

  Pig works a Butter Rum Life Saver off the roll and pops it into his mouth, gnashes it up between his teeth. “I mean,” he says, “just look at this place.”

  Maja puts her book down, looks out the window of the car. Café Soulouque doesn’t have any posted hours but it gi
ves every sign of closing soon. One of the workers, maybe the bartender, has exited the building. He leans in the doorway, relaxing in the cooling night, wiping his hands on a rag before running them over the surface of his bald head. Maja inspects him in her mind to see if he’s holding the knife on his person and gets nothing other than a busy fizz of residue.

  “Honestly?” Pig continues. “I expected that it was going to be in a vault or something. Maybe—maybe—a museum. Point is, someplace defensible, fortified. And instead we’re going to find it in some little mud-person shithole?”

  Maja looks up from her book again and waits for more. Typically, her clients turn inward during the final preparatory stages before an extraction attempt: they concentrate, grow quiet, sometimes they even descend into a kind of solemnity, as though they are reflecting on what it will mean to get what they want. But Pig has grown increasingly chatty: either he’s nervous or else it’s just that his sugar intake is finally beginning to express itself as surplus energy. Or both.

  “Unbelievable,” Pig says.

  Maja says nothing. Maybe earlier in the day she would have made the effort to mirror his astonishment, but in truth, even then, she felt no surprise. The things she finds are never where anyone expects them to be. If they were where you expected them to be, you wouldn’t need to hire her in the first place.

  “I’m not complaining,” Pig says. “Don’t get me wrong. Tactically, it’s a huge win for us.”

  For you, Maja thinks.

  “I mean,” Pig says, “I was ready to fight a private security force, hell, a Goddamn army. But this place—it’s just run by a couple of fuckers. Degenerates.”

  Pig looks out of the car at the bartender. Maja looks over at him as well. Bits and pieces of his life begin to trickle in. An image of him in a market, buying prawns, then a later image of him sitting at a table in a hot apartment, in his undershirt, eating the prawns, drinking from a wet bottle of beer. Putting down his fork to sift through a pile of junk mail.